Life in the Sixth World
by waywardshepherd
Summary: This is a series of short in-character responses to various aspects of life in the Sixth World that were discussed on our Shadowrun group's mailing list. The character doing all the talking here is Rake, a 50-year-old elf sharpshooter/face-man with a law degree and a checkered past. Standard disclaimer: Shadowrun ain't mine, Rake is.
1. Chapter 1 - Ghouls

Hey, it's not all bad news, chummer: ghouls become dual-natured (it helps to "see" astrally when you've gone blind), develop super-hearing and hyper-smell, and grow claws. Actually, that sounds pretty horrific, but Rule #34 applies... shudder

Whatever. I even met a guy once who claimed the ghoul's life wasn't half-bad, but I pumped him full of incendiary rounds and kicked him out into the sunlight before he could hand me a membership card to his exclusive "club".

I'll leave you with a bit of advice, omae: if you do get infected, word on the street says Tamanous is hiring...

-Rake


	2. Chapter 2 - Tamanous

Hey now, SysOp: don't go blaming me for reminding everybody about the nasty things going bump in the night that they'd rather ignore. It's harsh out there, folks; get used to it.

Tamanous is just another example of market forces at work, chummer, and is barely the tip of a very nasty organlegging iceberg. At least Tamanous tends toward business-like in its transactions. Seriously, though, let me share some advice about dealing with organleggers of any persuasion:

1. Don't get too uptight or squeamish about the trade; 'leggers can be an awfully convenient means of evidence disposal.

2, Only work with someone you already know or have been referred to through very trusted sources.

3. Don't meet them with "product" in person. You can easily become "product" yourself if you've got 'warez worth reselling.

Remind me sometime to tell you kiddos my story about delivering product to Tamamous using said products' own ride, driven remotely, of course.

What? It's not like those dead guys were using their van anymore!

-Rake


	3. Chapter 3 - Insect Spirits

Bugs are bad news, you say? Is understatement a new "thing" or something on the Matrix now? 'Cause if so, you've mastered it, chummer.

Seriously, though: is understatement a thing now? I never can keep up with Matrix trends. You wired hacker youths and technomantic babes keep the trends here in optoelectronic-Toyland moving at breakneck speeds. Don't ask me if I'm too old for this drek, because then I'll have to answer...

Anyways, yeah, this node's sysop oracle nailed it: bugs are way bad news, kiddos.

Let me tell you from personal experience, working for Ares during the late '50s was made extra fun by all the bad PR from the Bug City fiasco. Fortunately, I was in the Ares Arms division, so the fallout on us was limited. Those chummers over in the Knight Errant security arm, though... Well, let's sum it up like this: rumor was that they had to use the latest therapeutic boosted simsense to "reset" their Assistant VP for PR after each press conference. Medically-sanctioned BTL, folks - nothing but the finest in drek that will fry your brain for the top brass!

But that's about all the personal knowledge I have of insect spirits and all the horror they cause. This sort of mojo is best left to the Awakened, but they are also the most likely to be seduced and corrupted by it. Something about an easier path to greater power - sounds like the same tagline used to push anything addictive, if you ask me. I may have run across something "bug-like" once while working with the comrades, but they had sent along Svetlana, who had something she liked to call "special old country magic" for dealing with spirits she couldn't control. It looked like a waste of a perfectly good bottle of vodka to me, but I guess tossing in some Awakened salmon eggs and lighting it on fire makes it extra dangerous, magically-speaking. Strangest Molotov cocktail ever...

Somebody with some wiz mojo know-how should add some informed perspective to the discussion here, because old man Rake is nearly tapped-out on all things bug. I leave you slots with a couple of parting thoughts that might save your hoop one day:

1. Bug spirit exterminating is best left to the magical types (unless they tell you otherwise).

2. Keep a close eye on your team's mage/shaman/witchdoctor/houngan/etc. after the fact to make sure they haven't been "convinced" to switch sides mid-game.

-Rake


	4. Chapter 4 - Toxic Magic

Toxics, huh? The week's theme on this node must be "creepifying magic stuff that keeps you awake at night". Definitely not in my wheelhouse.

Still, I've been around a while, so you do hear about stuff like this and even come across folks who have dealt with such things first hand. I've got two stories on the subject that are probably worth sharing.

First, a secondhand story, courtesy of Vasily, a comrade from my previous "employer" who had started out "professional" life as a mercenary in the old country. After too much drink, he would sometimes recall this horrifying tale of his unit crossing paths with something their combat mage described as a "minor radiation spirit" before his eyes glowed like flares and he died, burnt from the inside out. Vasily goes on to say that they were a good 30 klicks away from the old Chernobyl reactor site when that happened. Many were killed as they tried to flee, and those who survived all suffered from radiation sickness. Vasily claims the only thing that saved him and the other survivors was luck: the fallen mage's bound earth elemental went wild and decided to attack the radiation spirit instead of them. shudder Just thinking about it makes my wires twitch.

Unfortunately, I know from firsthand experience that the more "common" toxics are still pretty frightening. Way back during my time with the UCAS Army, my first assignment as a new 1LT was taking my platoon of sharpshooters and scouts up to the Everett Naval Yards to help them with an infestation of some kind of dangerously large fish-y critters. After we tracked and sniped a few of them, the mages and scientists on hand went to assensing, dissecting, and whatever-ing they do. They determined the super-fish were some kind of salmon or trout that had grown massive and Awakened under the influence of some sort of toxic beast spirit (a.k.a. "abomination"), likely drawn there by pollutants dredged up from the harbor bottom during recent construction. There I was again: bringing bullets to a magic fight. Fortunately, the UCAS military has its share of magic types, so the problem was eventually solved. Did I say "experimental weapon"? No, of course I didn't. I said "experimental bio-drones" and "corporate partnership". You guessed right: sharks with lasers, but way more effective than that old pre-trid movie would have you believe.

Am I feeding you a tall tale? Maybe so, chummer. Maybe not. Even I have to keep a few secrets, especially those that aren't entirely mine to tell.

-Rake


	5. Chapter 5 - Blood Magic

Blood magic is seriously bad mojo, chummer. The good news is that there's not a lot of it (unless you're down south of the border), since magic is rare enough and twisted evil magic is a tiny offshoot of that. Even old guys like me are unlikely to have crossed paths with a blood mage.

I can tell you this much, kiddos: despite never having seen the stuff in person myself, just the thought of blood magic is enough to give me a bad case of the willies. Best to slot and run if you ever come up against that sort of drek. Live to fight another day and all that.

-Rake.


	6. Chapter 6 - Food

The corps say you'll eat your krill-infused nutrisoy and like it, chummer! Highly-engineered, mass-processed "food"-stuffs like those described here have been around longer than many of you kids have been alive. I have vague recollections of a little more abundance of the real stuff from my early childhood, but it was scarce even then.

On a related note, food allergies in the brave new world of frankenfoods can be suprisingly troublesome, given the very small array of raw materials. Take it from someone who has firsthand experience with a meat allergy: they mix the krill in with the other three all too frequently. Fortunately, many of my fellow elves suffer from the same issue, so those food-making corps based in the Tir have focused on plant-only products.

All elf-slur joking aside, these Telestrian brand "Dandelion Bars" are pretty good. No actual dandelions, of course. According to the ingredients on the empty wrapper I've got here they officially contain: "nutrisoy strain TX-317 binder, Blue Mountain strain honey mushroom mycochunks, modified cyanobacterial fillers, and synthetic dandelion flavor." Tasty and delicious, omae.

-Rake


	7. Chapter 7 - NERPS!

Everybody loves their Nerps! Even a couple of decades down the road, I still find this whole business with nerps to be pretty amusing. I also have a relevant story to share, which is perhaps no surprise to you chummers by now. Anyways, between my time with Ares and my contract with the Vory, I managed a few years as a half-successful attorney who catered to the "don't ask us lots of questions" crowd. One of the nuttiest cases I ever took involved a civil suit between two deckers (we still called them that back then in the pre-wireless Matrix days) who were running some kind of convoluted financial scheme based on "nerps futures".

These were able to convince a bunch of poorly-informed slots that this ill-defined nerps thing was really going to take off, and built up a sort of Ponzi-style investment fraud around that. Turns our these two were also trying to stick it to each other the whole time, hoping to walk away with all the nuyen and leave the other holding the debt and the blame. Of course, the court wasn't privy to much of that: as far as the judge was concerned, this was a straightforward breech-of-contract suit between two former business partners.

The whole situation rapidly became an omnishambles, and I found myself wrapped up in it, looking for an an exit that wouldn't cost me too much. My client and I eventually got lucky: we found out the other party in the case had a bit of an addiction to BTL dreamchips and liked to frequent this one bunraku parlor while tripping on them. How did we find that out, you ask? Lawyer-client privilege, omae.

Long story short: we paid off an employee at the parlor to slip a customized personafix to the poor slot fighting us in court. My client had applied his wiz programming skills to make sure the software was both difficult to detect and had an expiration date so that it left little trace. The next court session, the other counsel was blindsided by their client who was suddenly over-sharing on the witness stand and unraveling their side of the case in the process. The jury took all of about a nanosecond to decide in our favor. Brilliant, smooth, and lucrative, like the best of plans.

Lessons learned, kiddos: don't be a beetlehead and be careful who you trust when your tripping/jacked in/gone astral.

-Rake


	8. Chapter 8 - Device Modes

A word to the wise, chummers: get yourself two commlinks, one disposable and one of tactical quality.

Keep the disposable one in private or active mode as needed and run your better one in hidden mode, preferably with encryption and firewall, since it will be the basis of your PAN. Load your disposable with your fake ID and licenses so you look legit, while keeping all shadow traffic routed through your hidden one.

This practice makes you that much harder to track down and further decouples your fake ID from your less-than-legal means of employment. It also helps prevent hacks of your PAN, since the obvious target doesn't control any peripherals, such as cyberware, vehicles, or weapons. With the dummy link arrangement, somebody trying to hack you first has to find your hidden commlink node, then break your firewall, then break your encryption - that will slow down all but the best hackers.

And now you kiddos know why I keep a bargain-bin comm on me even though you know that all biz-related details are routed through my implanted 'link.

-Rake


End file.
